It’s been a busy winter. Amid all the Facebook scandals and new government regulation work that’s going on, I thought I’d send an update on travels. Here are some visuals from a recent 17 day, six country, seven speech trip. (Fun facts: nine different hotels, and doing laundry in a Vienna laundromat that only takes instructions from a smartphone app.)

The background image is the HIMSS19 (health IT systems conference) logo repeated over and over and over and over, because that brutal exhausting conference is like that :-), and is the background of everything else.

As I’ve written before, my business is evolving as the patient movement matures. For years our movement was, frankly, a question: “Should medicine listen to patients? Why?” I’ve spoken at hundreds of events, and happily, it’s no longer a question: we won. Now my speeches are increasingly about the academic and commercial aspects of patient engagement, not the “why.”

A sure sign of progress is that now the patient movement is progressing into business, which has opened the door for advisory work. My newest client is Massive Bio, a very different kind of entrant in the so-called “second opinion market,” where patients in trouble seek other options. It’s a popular idea but doing it successfully is not easy. Here’s the first post I wrote for their site; more will follow.[Read more…]

Last summer I did a webinar about patient engagement (here’s the replay) for Phreesia, a company that makes an iPad-like tablet that integrates a lot of steps to get you (the patient) into the provider’s computer system. Afterward, they said they “monitor the attention level of the attendees (it’s a GoToWebinar feature) … and it was the highest I’ve ever seen it.”

Really? GoToWebinar feature? Yep, the system keeps track of how long attendees stay, whether they ask questions, and even whether they listen but stop watching by switching to another window while listening to the audio.

In life, in relationships, and in social movements, sometimes things get messy. Despite all the things I’m committed to, I made a mistake last fall while extremely over-tired, and behaved offensively to someone I didn’t even know, a volunteer at the wonderful Stanford Medicine X conference (MedX), about which I’ve written so favorably here and on e-patients.net and even in the BMJ. They’ve decided to ask me to sit it out for a year (i.e. not attend), and I accept it – it’s reasonable. I apologize to MedX and I apologize to the volunteer.

I believe in introspection – “the examined life,” as they say – and continuous self-improvement. So later I’ll say a bit more about what I’ve learned while thinking about this. (Update: that post is here.)

Continuing this monthly series: here’s this month’s update on travels, new bookings, and writings.

Access to our families’ health records:
The time for action is coming

The best in healthcare of course depends on access to all useful information, but HHS has reported to Congress that certain parties are “knowingly interfering” with the flow of families’ health records. Two posts:

Talk about it with friends, too – it’s getting to be “Paul Revere” time. Don’t wait til it’s your family member who’s in a crisis.

Over on Medium, I commentedon a post by entrepreneur Steve Kiernan about this issue, saying:
“Who out there wants to present an argument why families should be kept apart from their people’s health data? … Is there any ethical or moral argument for no spigots?”